This invention relates generally to semiconductors and, more specifically, relates to bipolar junction transistors.
This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention disclosed below. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise explicitly indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section. Abbreviations that may be found in the specification and/or the drawing figures are defined below, after the main part of the detailed description section.
An SOI lateral bipolar junction transistor (L-BJT) fabricated with CMOS-compatible processes has shown competitive advantages with high drive current (e.g., greater than 3 mA/mm), low stand-by power, and operation voltages scalable with base materials. The narrow base of these designs allows for high frequency, which is highly desirable.
It is nonetheless challenging to make such thin base structures, as there can be dopant diffusion from the emitter and collector into the base during fabrication, and this dopant diffusion will, e.g., broaden the emitter and collector regions that lead to shorter spacing between them and increase the possibility of electrical short.